ook almost apologetic yet
utterly kind--"perhaps I have more faith in you..."

Duchemin bowed his head over hands so tightly knitted that the knuckles
were white with strain.

"You would not have faith," he said in a low voice, "if you knew--"

She interrupted in a gentle voice: "Are you sure?"

"--What I must tell you!"

"My friend," she said: "tell me nothing that would distress you."

He did not immediately reply; the struggle going on within him was only
too plainly betrayed by engorged veins upon his forehead and exceeding
pallor of countenance.

"If you had told those detectives," he said at length, without looking
up, "you must have known very soon. They must have found me out without
too much delay. And who in the world would ever believe anybody else
guilty when they learned that Andre Duchemin, your guest for three
weeks, was only an alias for Michael Lanyard, otherwise the Lone Wolf?"

"But you are wrong, monsieur," she replied, without the long pause of
surprise he had anticipated. "I should not have believed you guilty."

Dumb with wonder, he showed her a haggard face. And she had for him, in
the agony and the abasement of his soul, still quivering from the rack
of emotion that alone could have extorted his confession--she had for
him the half-smile, tender and compassionate, that it is given to most
men to see but once in a lifetime on the lips and in the eyes of the
woman beloved. "Then you knew--!"

"I suspected."

"How long--?"

"Since the night those strange people were here and tried to make you
unhappy with their stupid talk of the Lone Wolf. I suspected, then; and
when I came to know you better, I felt quite sure..."

"And now you _know_--yet hesitate to turn me over to the police!"

"No such thought has ever entered my head. You see--I'm afraid you
don't quite understand me--I have faith in you."

"But why?"

She shook her head. "You mustn't ask me that."

At the end of a long moment he said in a broken voice: "Very well: I
won't ... Not yet awhile ... But this great gift of faith in me--I
can't accept that without trying to repay it."

"If you accept, my friend, you repay."

"No," said Michael Lanyard--"that's not enough. Your jewels must come
back to you, if I go to the ends of the earth to find them. And"--man's
undying vanity would out--"if there's anyone living who can find them
for you, it is I."

XI

AU REVOIR

Early in the afternoon Eve de Montalais made